Streaming Media Europe 2008—to be held in London 16–17 October—is shaping up to be the most comprehensive event since the show was relaunched in 2006, with 20 panel sessions, case studies, and paper presentations by more than 60 speakers representing such organizations as the BBC, At the Races, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, radio.de, Ovum Research, Monster.fi, and the London School of Economics.

Kicking off each day will be not one but two keynote sessions, each one representing a leading player in the online video space:

Thursday, 16 October

—Claude London, director, digital media & Kangaroo JV, BBC Worldwide

—Volker Glaeser, director of internet services and global head of online, Vodafone

What’s more, the Thursday keynotes will be free and open to the public (all attendees need to do is register onsite for a free exhibition hall pass).

To give you a taste of what you’ll see at Streaming Media Europe, we talked to two of our keynote speakers—London and Hendry—about their experiences and assessments of the online video landscape. For interviews with Glaeser and Lewis, visit the Streaming Media Europe Blog at www.streamingmediaeurope.net.

Claude London, BBC Worldwide

Can you give our readers a brief description of the charter of BBC Worldwide and how it fits into the rest of the BBC?

BBC Worldwide is the wholly owned commercial subsidiary of the BBC. Its role is to maximise the value of the BBC’s assets after the public service window, for the benefit of the licence payer—essentially we commercialise BBC content with all of our profits being returned into the public service business.

As Digital Media we oversee a stable of commercial websites such as BBC.com (the BBC website outside of the U.K.), TopGear.com and GardenersWorld.com; we syndicate digital content via outlets such as YouTube and MySpace as well as mobile operators; and we’re also a founder of Kangaroo, a VOD joint venture with U.K. broadcasters ITV and Channel 4.